Nestled among some of the big budget, blockbuster games at Sony’s PS3 Beta event last week was relative small-fry offering Dead Nation, a multi-directional arcade-style shooter from Housemarque, the creator of the brilliant and highly addictive Super Stardust HD.
Destined for PSN this Fall, Dead Nation utilises the top-down view-point giving you a 360 degree view around the ‘B’ horror movie inspired environments as zombie masses attack you from all angles. You play as one of the survivors of a deadly virus who is hell bent on helping rid the world of thousands of zombies that now roam the streets looking for humans to feed on. The storyline is totally cliched, but we weren’t expecting Resident Evil quality from a PSN zombie shooter – it sets the scene and that’s all you really need.
The aim of the game is to navigate your way around a number of locations slaughtering zombies with a range of weapons and picking up loot to spend at one of the many weapon huts where you can upgrade and buy more firepower. Housemarque has opted for the dual-analog approach, so you use the left stick to control your player and the right to control his torch, which you use to aim at the zombie hordes and light up some of the darker areas in the game where you’ll find hidden loot.
The controls feel tight. You can switch through your weapon set quickly and there’s no sign of problematic camera angles that plague some games of this type (see Monster Madness: Battle For Surburbia for details.) You can also rotate 360 degrees quickly and intuitively, which is just as well because the sheer amount of zombies on screen is quite incredible. You’ll see one and then another lumber toward you from behind a trash can, and then all of a sudden there’s dozens of them heading your way and you’ve only got one clip left in your SMG, so you lob a grenade toward the pack, switch to your shotgun and frantically start blasting away while buzzing around desperately trying to stay out of their grasp.
In this pre-alpha demo we were given access to a conventional set of weapons, including a rifle, a shotgun and a SMG. While the Sony representative in attendance was unsure whether the finished version will feature any off the wall firearms, they did reassure us they’ll be a lot more weapons to choose from. Aside from weapon-based combat there’s a satisfying melee attack that you can execute when you’re surrounded, which amusingly can knock a zombies head clean off or cause a domino effect on those around the pack. It’s also fun to use the environment to your advantage, setting fire to a car and watching zombies catch themselves alight, or targeting an exploding barrel and watching limbs fly everywhere.
Dead Nation is quite a gory game. There’s a lot of blood, a lot of guts and a lot of flying body parts, especially when you toss a grenade into a group of enemies, or they step on a mine. You’ll even see torsos from zombies that you have blown in half dragging themselves across the street to reach you. Gameplay generally involves buzzing around utilising the full 360 degree angle to dispatch any zombies that head toward you, but the pace of the gameplay shifts cleverly giving you some slower-paced moments to explore and find loot, and then all of a sudden exploding into a frenetic sequence of events as you frantically try and clear a path through the zombies.
Housemarque obviously knows how to create an addictive game. Racking up combos and gathering loot didn’t ever get boring during our time with Dead Nation and there were some great looking environments to roam around too, from abandoned streets and car-lots, to parks and petrol stations. There’s a lot of detail in the locations and great lighting effects that create an eerie atmosphere. The character models also look great. There are loads of different animations and zombie types, including policeman armed with pistols, tall zombies, short ones, fast ones armed with weapons, and slower ones that you can pick off from a distance. Despite the objective of the game simply being to kill zombies, there was always something new to see around every corner.
With co-op play and online leaderboards also confirmed for Housemarque’s multi-directional shooter, we can’t see any reason at all why this won’t do very well on PSN. Dead Nation may well be set to gain a legion of admirers who will become addicted to its fast-paced and entertaining gameplay.